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Google Shopping is an online shopping campaign which can really give merchants a headache. Here are some best practices and ways to ease that headache.

When listing on Google Shopping you should keep in mind three major elements of the Google campaign: Your product data, or your Google Shopping data feed; How much you are spending on Google; and what your PPC is on Google Shopping.

For Google to list your Product Listing Ads on Google Shopping, Google needs your product information, and the way you communicate that to Google Shopping is with the Google Shopping product data feed.

What is a Google Shopping Data Feed?

Your Google Product Listing Ads (PLA) product data feed at its simplest is a detailed spreadsheet. This file has all of your products information: everything you sell and all of the product information specific to those products (eg. size, color, URL).

In other words, the Google Shopping data feed contains your product data. It’s a Google Shopping data feed because you must regularly feed it to Google in order to update your product data whenever you change a product name, price, category, image, URL or stock availability.

*Note: Although you manage Google Shopping through the Google AdWords login, the Google Shopping feed should be sent to the Google Merchant Center.

How Do I Optimize My Google Shopping Data Feed?

Google determines which Product Listing Ads appear in a search depending on Google Shopping Cost Per Click (CPC) bids and product information from the Google Shopping product data feed. Google matches these merchant inputs as best it can with a consumer’s search terms.

Because of this, your Google Shopping data feed should focus on providing Google Shopping and consumers relevant product data. You can do this by having product titles and product descriptions in the Google Shopping feed which have the information shoppers are looking for.

Google Shopping Feed Product Titles and Descriptions

When you're creating product descriptions and product titles keep in mind what shoppers are searching (e.g. brand, size, MPN, UPC, product title, category title (i.e. ‘baby strollers’) etc.), you will want to do some research here and or get some SEO advice.

Here are a few articles to get you started with SEO, and help you understand why keywords and titles are so important in your Google Shopping data feed and beyond:

Once you've determined the terms you want to include in your product titles and descriptions in the Google Shopping data feed, you need to organize the order of keywords in those titles and descriptions.

Although this has not been officially confirmed, we’ve found that Google seems to count data feed product titles and descriptions from left to right in terms of importance. Product information at the beginning of titles and descriptions in your Google Shopping data feed counts for more than shopping feed data following those initial terms, farther to the right.

When you are creating Google Shopping product data, try to put more important product descriptors at the front (to the left), and those which are searched less to the right. Google Shopping Cost Google determines which shopping feed ads to display based on the data in the merchant’s Google Shopping data feed in addition to the amount a merchant bids on AdWords.

How Much Does Google Shopping Cost?

Google does not have a minimum bid or a minimum cost for Google Shopping / Product Listing Ads. You can choose a cost per click as low as $0.01, and there is no minimum daily budget, so you have a lot of flexibility with how much you spend on Google Shopping.

Google Shopping can cost you $1 a day, $1 a month, or more than $100 a day, depending on how much visibility you want your products to have. In Q4, we conducted a Google Shopping study which shows merchant costs on Google Shopping averaged at $11.30 in spend for every $100.00 in sales. Compared to other marketing channels, Google Shopping costs were extremely low, even lower than the flat fees on most Amazon Marketplace categories. Google Shopping, if managed correctly, should yield similar Google Shopping cost / revenue ratios, depending on your average order value, price compared to your competitors, and site-wide conversion rates.

You can dictate how much Google Shopping costs by increasing or decreasing your daily budget and your PPC bids. Keep in mind that if your costs on Google Shopping are low, you also will have low Google Shopping ad visibility.

Additionally, it's important to know that Google will stop serving your ads once your Google Shopping daily budget is reached. So if you have a $20 max daily cost on Google Shopping, your Google Shopping ads will show up until that $20 is reached. If you have a high Google Shopping average CPC cost with a low Google Shopping cost, your ads will only appear for a fraction of the day as you will run out of spend more quickly.

The amount of products you have also plays a big role on how much your Google Shopping campaign will cost. If you have 100,000 products at a cost of 30 cents per click, you will spend a lot more than a merchant with 100 products at the same cost per click. Google determines which ads to display on Google Shopping based on how the keywords in your data feed match a consumer’s search, in addition to the CPC bids you set up in your Google Shopping PPC campaign.

How to Set Your Google Shopping PPC

To be competitive on Google Shopping, you ideally want to be among the top five ads for a Google Shopping result page.

Realistically your Google Shopping PPC campaign may not be able to afford to rank high on Google Shopping depending on what the average Google Shopping CPC is for your category, and how much you are comfortable spending on Google Shopping.

Other merchants on Google Shopping will be changing their PPC campaign and how much they are spending weekly (if not daily), so you should keep an eye on your average position for your Google Shopping Ads, and how much you are spending on Google shopping.

Google Shopping Data Feed, Cost, and PPC Best Practices Review

The Google Shopping Data Feed:

Google Shopping Costs

Choose a daily budget which fits your goals and how much you can spend on Google Shopping, but also keeps in mind how much visibility you want. Google Shopping costs to revenue ratios in Q4 were better than all other shopping feed marketing channels. Prepare to monitor your budget and costs on your Google Shopping campaign, especially in the first few weeks.

Google Shopping PPC

When setting PPC amounts for your Google Shopping Ad Groups, consider how high you want to rank on Google Shopping pages, and how long you want to be serving Ads on Google throughout the day.

Google Shopping is a big deal. Realistically you're stretched for time and resources, but taking a look at your Google Shopping campaign will be more than worth the investment. Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions.

About CPCStrategy —
CPC Strategy is a data driven, retail focused marketing and technology agency. Founded in 2007 on the principle of matching consumer intent with product inventory, CPC Strategy leverages the tactics and strategies of the biggest names in retail and evolves them to suit your business goals.

Branden - I too have found the conversion rates to be almost double the text ads.

Mary - Is there any evidence that the Google Trusted Sites checkmark has any impact on the clicks and conversions? I'm trying to make the case to a client that we need to get Trusted Sites going for this reason. Thanks!

Hi,I have submitted the data feed (1500 products)and im awaiting google to review and make active.I have an adwords campaign that is not running at the moment set at £25 per day. How do i set a cost per click for these 1500 products submitted .

Hey MaryGreat postquick question- is it best to break down the Main PLA group into:A: categories / sub categoriesorB: product type / sub product type

or

mix them?

C: categories / sub categories / product types

then taking all down to the individual products

Going a little nuts trying to decide!? and I have also found that the management isn't very forgiving - so my tip is be very careful making changes to a successful set up (as I have found out to my cost!)

Sooo unfortunately there isn't a silver bullet answer here in terms of how you should break out your campaigns. It's always going to vary based on your Google presence, budget, ROI goals, and various other elements that are specific to your store (brands, best sellers,etc.).

I can tell you that ideally you want your campaign to be broken out in such a way that you can:

2) But also so that products and categories you know perform well can be given more exposure through bidding modifications

3) In such a way that you can further segment your groups depending on how your campaign performance evolves.

Again these are very high level ideas, but I'd have to know more about your store specifically to give you a more concrete answer. I would say definitely spend some time in Analytics- this will help you at the very least weed out some things.

I'm also curious what your successful campaign set up is right now? Are you using an All Products campaign? If this is succeeding for you, you're definitely missing out on levers to push more conversions with a more refined strategy.

Feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions. In addition here is a resource you may find useful (Full disclosure, this is from CPC Strategy).

I have added lots of negatives over time and when I look for instance in the search query report of Pentax its running very much within brandhere is an example of the top terms within Pentax brandpentax q10 pentax k 50 pentax k50 pentax k3 pentax 645z pentax q7 pentax q s1 pentax q10 compact system camera pentax k s1 pentax lenses pentax pentax camera pentax k5

Ahh ok sounds like you're already broken out fairly extensively! Since you're already structured by Brand (assuming this campaign has been live for some time and is performing), it's probably not a good idea to delete and restructure (possibly test two campaigns side by side, but be careful with overlap there).

You're most likely best off further segmenting your existing campaign with custom labels (best sellers, products about $50, etc.) and refining bids based on performance.

I'd also consider tinkering with device targeting, custom ad schedules (for time of day, day of week,etc.) and location targeting.

Hey Mary, useful and ultimately common sense. There seems to be scant information out there for optimising shopping feeds and it is almost a halfway house between traditional organic optimisation and PPC so I think it leaves a lot of people in the cold. I made a few tweaks to the titles of products as described and improved a clients visibility and impressions no end. Cheers. Marcus

Thanks for the great post, We've found that product listing ads are a great way of boosting our customers sales. We're in the UK so the paid ads are more recent here which has made it an even bigger opportunity for our clients as many competitors haven't made the switch to the paid ads yet.Another best practice which we find really important is building up a negative keyword list in AdWords. While we can't proactively create a keyword list to target, we can identify any keywords that aren't relevant and are costing our clients money. It's vital to add negative keywords both at ad group and campaign level to ensure we're getting quality, relevant traffic and not wasting the budget.Again thanks for the great piece and I'm now off to test the keyword organization in our title tags!Cheers

Thanks Craig!I would agree, however I would caution people to be very careful with negative keywords in selecting only terms which are unrelated to product queries. You can always downbid Ad Groups instead of creating too many negative keywords.

Thanks for a great read (a few months old, yes, but still great). What tools (free or paid) would you recommend to optimize PLAs? Our PLAs are currently set up as one bid size for all products and I am not aware of an easy way to manage the bids either by SKU, product category, type etc. As most realize, there are more and less competitive products and products with higher or lower margin or perhaps products that are currently hot sellers and thus these products deserve a higher, a lower or a completely absent bid . So what toll or method would you recommend for adjusting and playing with bids for particular product or product category or product attribute? Thank you.

First things first, please don't break out your PLA campaign by SKU. This is a strategy which a lot of companies and people are advocating that DOES NOT have a good ROI. By all means segment by products which perform well but put them in ad groups with similar products.

You are at a good starting point- having an all products ad group is a great foundation! You'll want to expand and create some additional ad groups based on which products are performing well, and what you want to get more exposure.

The best tool you can use here is completely free: Google Analytics. Delve into your Analytics data to determine which groups of products (best sellers), brands, products over $X, etc. are selling or have a good return on investment. Create new ad groups for those, and give those ad groups a higher bid than your all products ad group. You can create these ad groups using your adwords label column (e.g for best sellers, price buckets, seasonal and sale items), or use existing columns to identify those ad groups (e.g brand). This is also a great place to start if you have questions: http://cpcstrategy.com/product-listing-ads/

Please feel free to reach out to me if you have any additional questions: mary@cpcstrategy.com

Hi Skifr,I wouldn't wholly discredit Google Shopping just because it's paid now. There are a lot of opportunities to get product exposure for merchants, even with a smaller budget.Feel free to reach out if you have any questions about Google Shopping or campaign best practices.

Great article for some general information. I haven't had the chance to dive into CSE and the metrics of Google Shopping ever since it became part of Google's paid services but I'm curious how effective you believe unique products fare? i.e. custom products with unique product names.

Hey William,Product Listing Ads show up in 2 places, on the Google Shopping tab, and also as ads on the search tab (depending on your query). So you can promote unique products, but how well they fare is going to depend on the category and how built out your feed is.What type of unique items do you sell?

Really useful post! Another thing I find useful when setting up PLAs is to make sure your settings in your AdWords campaign don't conflict with the setting in your Merchant Centre account otherwise you can be missing out on opportunities.

Great point Tara!A significant thing we've seen with the merchant center is issues with the account ID.Its important to be aware of your merchant center account ID when you are initially setting up your PLA campaign. Choosing the incorrect account ID, or an existing account ID with associated filters will really jam you up.Have you noticed any data quality errors or feed submission issues in the merchant center?

Hey Mary,Nice post!I'm just wondering if you have experimented with creating additional ad groups for the purpose of product targeting or promotional messages and if it made a difference to your CTR or conversion?Hamza

Thanks Hamza,I'd definitely recommend breaking out ad groups based on items which you've identified in Google Analytics or through your back end as top converters. This goes for products in price buckets, best sellers, items which are being featured in a sale, seasonal sellers, and items which have unique shipping options (e.g quick ship), etc. It's going to vary based on your category, and what other sellers are bidding, and your feed quality. But if you know a group of products performs well, or will perform well its a good idea to segment those in their own ad group with a bid higher than your all products ad group (and potentially other ad groups as well).

Really good info here. Thanks for sharing.I find that out of all the "shopping comparison" websites I am on, Google Shopping provides the best conversion rate. I just wish the Google Merchant dashboard was a little more robust.

Thanks for your comment Taylor!You should also check out Amazon Product Ads, which had a better conversion rate than Google Shopping for Q4 2012. Do you use the AdWords login in addition to the Google Merchant login? The AdWords login is more complex than the Merchant login, but you'll get a lot of useful information there, and this is where you'd be making Ad Group adjustments. An easy way to make sure you're only looking at product listing Ads is to select the "Auto Targets" tab for a campaign.